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Ov "belongs in a waxwork museum"; one gloomy November morning, in the Munich Pinakothek, he saw a picture -once ascribed to Giulio Romano, later to Domenichino-that turned his thoughts from Joan to Judith. In let- ters and diaries he described his aims. Although Judith and Holofernes are individuals, they are also representa- tives: she "the dizzying pinnacle of Judaism, of that people which believed it had a personal relationship with the Deity," and he of bold, speculative thought about godhead's subsisting in, created by, human endeavor, "born from a human womb." When Hebbel's Holofernes learns that his monarch, Nebuchadnezzar, has proclaimed him- self sole God, he is at once struck by the grand idea and indignant at the insufficiency of its instigator. A conflict between belief in, and obedience to, a Higher Judge and proud assertion that men and women are their own arbiters -polarized in Judith and Holofernes but complicated by their inner uncer- tainties-runs through the work. So does male-female opposition, with many attempts at defining essential qualities and differences. "Judith" is a thoughtful and interesting play. A modern revival, in which the dramatic explorations of religion, nationalism, and feminism could be followed more closely than in an operatic treatment, is overdue. On the lyric stage, simplifica- tion becomes inevitable. In an 1840 diary entry Hebbel wrote, "I can't use the Judith of the Bible. That Judith is a widow who lures Holofernes into her net with her trickery and cunning: she is hap- py to have his head in her sack and sings and expresses her jubi- lation with all of Israel for three months. That is mean: such a character is not worthy of suc- cess. Acts of this sort may successfully be committed by an enthusiasm which later feels its punishment within, but not by a deceitful nature which sees merit in good luck. My Judith is para- lyzed by her deed. . . . It becomes clear to her that she has exceeded her limits, that, at the very least, she has done what is right for the wrong reasons." Hebbel's Judith is a virgin (as not in the Apocrypha) until (as not in the Apocrypha) she is raped by Holofernes. Hebbel also wrote, "The kind of cour- age which is ready to confront the most monstrous man can only emanate from the soul of a virgin: this is grounded in AUGU5T 20, 1990 conviction in the human mind, is con- gruent with universal faith, is attested to by history." In a long speech his Judith tells the audience how on her bridal night-she was not yet fourteen-her husband, Manasses, stayed by some mysterious force, fell to his knees and dared not approach her, even though she invited him. In beleaguered Bethulia, when, stirred by the accounts of Holofernes, she reaches her decision after long prayer, she cries, "The path to my deed lies through sinning. I thank thee Lord!" After the rape, she comes from Holofernes' tent to declare that a vir- gin's moment of greatest triumph is the moment when she is no longer a virgin -and reënters the tent to kill her ravisher. For at least three reasons, Hebbel's Judith feels guilt: she has been sexually aroused by Holofernes (rather as Donna Anna, in Hoffmann's read- ing of Mozart's opera, is by Don Gio- vanni); she has killed him not as her country's foe but as her own personal violator; and she has behaved in an unwomanly way. Like the heroine of Jean Giraudoux's clever "Judith" ( 1931), she has done the necessary, pious, patriotic deed "for the wrong reasons." As a consequence, she be- comes not the revered dame, living on to a hundred and five, of the Apocrypha but a suicidal neurotic. Hebbel's play is, in his own words, "brought to an end by emotion and confusion of the senses." Judith rejects the acclaim of her people and exacts from the elders and priests a promise that they will kill her should she wish it; she can- not bear to think that she may be bearing Holofernes' son. (Yet it is tempting to contemplate a se- quel in which that son, offspring of two great spirits, becomes a reconciling avatar.) The closing lines are "I pray God that my womb may be unfruitful. Perhaps He will be merciful to me!" Composers have sought to make Hebbel's ending more specific. Rez- nicek's Judith stabs herself. In Mat- thus's version, Ephraim, a young Jew in love with her, cries "Hail, whore of Judah," rips off her clothes, and "does violence to her." And during a final passacaglia-a tense, potent setting of desperate verses from Psalm 69, "Save me, 0 God: for the waters are come in, even to my soul" -there is, according to the score, a "pantomimic presenta- tion of Judith's destruction, with all the --*